At first glance, Netflix’s new reality show Hype House–about a group of young, rich TikTok influencers who live together under one roof–may simply seem like The Real World with a ring light. And in a lot of ways, it is, as Hype House founder Thomas Petrou notes in an early episode of the series, out Jan. 7, “We have ten 20-year-olds living in a $5 million house together, filming content all day. It just doesn’t sound real.”
But over the course of Season 1’s eight mind-numbing episodes, it becomes increasingly clear that it’s not real–because the last thing any of these bona fide social media stars want to do is film any content at all. Hype House is a show about a bunch of famous kids who hate what they do.
The bitterest of them all is Petrou, the most stressed-out 22-year-old with a Rolls-Royce. He calls himself the dad of the house, and he’s perpetually weathered, exhausted, and has had it up to here with his lazy friends who aren’t doing their part to keep Hype House afloat. As Petrou helpfully explains, the rent on the Moorpark, California, mansion–made notorious in a 2020 New York Times profile– is paid for by the brand deals they do on Hype House’s social media channels, and everyone in the house is expected to help out by contributing viral-worthy content.
Petrou says he sees Hype House as a sort of Nickelodeon or Disney Channel–a launching pad for young stars to catapult into the mainstream, à la Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez, whom he names as examples of A-listers who have successfully landed that jump. That’s the entire goal of Hype House, he claims, and he wants to see his friends go far and become famous while also encouraging them to “just have fun.”
The problem? None of them are having any fun.
Take Vinnie Hacker, the newest member of Hype House, who admits he blew up on social media because of his barrage of “thirst traps,” which he’s since parlayed into a massive following on the livestreaming platform Twitch. At a group dinner, one of the house’s fellow Generic White Guys vents about the 19-year-old beefcake, saying Hacker “hates” making content and the attention that comes with it–a claim later confirmed by Hacker himself, who’s grown frustrated with the demand for more shirtless selfies from his legions of increasingly obsessed fans, because all he wants to do is be a full-time streamer on Twitch. At the same dinner, Petrou responds by pointing out, “Ninety percent of the most popular social media people don’t want to be social media people.”
Which begs the question: Why is this dude trying to force it? The throughline of the entire Netflix series is Petrou’s disdain for his friends not contributing enough to Hype House. But Petrou is a walking contradiction; he encourages the house’s members to strive for the next level of their careers, then hates when they manage to do that. A self-proclaimed hustler, he frequently delivers parental screeds about the Hype House brand and their strategy, calling house meetings where he tries and fails to convince everyone to be a team player.
The main perpetrator of all this, in Petrou’s eyes, is his Hype House co-founder Chase Hudson, aka Lil Huddy, who was once part of the O.G. group before moving into his own mansion in Encino. The plan was for that house to be an extension of Hype House, but as Petrou repeatedly reminds us, Hudson hasn’t held up his end of the deal because he never contributes content to the Hype House socials anymore. That’s because, frankly, Hudson got too famous. The series finds the brooding, vampire-obsessed eboy in the midst of making his debut album under Interscope Records and brazenly proclaiming, “My goal is to be fucking Beyoncé.” (Whether or not that’s a smart plan is up for debate; he’s racked up over 100 million streams on Spotify, sure, but he’s also told while rehearsing for a live show, “You don’t actually need to sing. The coolest move is to just go [holding a fake mic out to the crowd], ‘I can’t hear you!’” Beyoncé would never.)
Hudson isn’t the only notable influencer who outgrew Hype House–past members include TikTok’s reigning queen, Charli D’Amelio, and her sister Dixie, who have gone on to star in a Hulu reality series about their family, and Addison Rae, who’s been adopted into the Kardashian circle and has launched a half-baked music and acting career. Basically everyone on Hype House seems to be lusting after that level of fame, including TikTok and YouTube star Larray, who appears as a regular on the Netflix show. “I’ve been doing social media for five years now. Anybody can be famous. Anybody,” he says. “A million followers on TikTok doesn’t mean shit. Can I be famous for being talented is the real question.”
Larray is one of the two saving graces of Hype House, a reprieve amid the sea of white dudes with shaggy hair who are impossible to tell apart. A gay, mixed-race 23-year-old from Compton, Larray is BFFs with the other real star of the show, Nikita Dragun, a trans woman who’s won over millions of fans with her fierce energy and over-the-top style. The two of them frequently and thoughtfully talk throughout the series about reclaiming their identities through social media and the fact that they face more scrutiny than white creators, especially when it comes to their brushes with cancel culture (Nikita has repeatedly been accused of blackfishing, which Larray confronts her about after feeling like he was disowned by the Black community for associating with her).
Larray and Nikita aren’t official Hype House members and don’t live in the mansion–and it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that they’re two of the most successful faces featured on the show. That’s because the house is filled with creators who never actually want to create, no matter how bored they all are. In a last-ditch attempt to motivate everyone, Petrou arranges a trip to Joshua Tree for the group to bond, aka to film some damn videos already. But his dreams of a content waterfall in the desert are quickly drowned–everyone is fighting, their camping ground is supposedly haunted, and Petrou breaks down crying because everyone’s just eating pizza and watching Ratatouille, at least in the case of Hype House member Ryland Storms. His excuse for not making any content on the trip? “We’re still so young and, like, we’re in this life and we’re making money that a 21-year-old, or whatever age, should not be making.”
Storms later contributes this other astute observation: “I feel like the reason that everyone’s in this industry is they weren’t good with authority to begin with, so that’s why they didn’t go the school route, and they wanted to be their own bosses.”
Part of that impulse, these creators make it abundantly clear, is their desire to not be beholden to someone else’s plan. Petrou keeps trying to wrangle them into productivity, he keeps failing, and by the end of the series he seems to decide that maybe content houses aren’t a good idea after all.
At least, that’s what he tells us–until the final scene of episode eight, when he announces that some of the house’s members have moved out after deciding they don’t want to live together anymore, and he’s now looking for fresh meat to recruit. The Hype House must go on, apparently. But who actually wants it to?
